So, I've been more or less casually playing CoH series since the original release and I think this has been qol issue with the wehrmarch in both games.When they're initially released they are fine or even overpowered because of the opposing vanilla faction design...eg. the devs don't need to bother thinking units from more than one angle initially.
In both games they start off with decent early game infantry and superior support weapons which when correctly microed will help them to fend off the allies till late game when their superior armor arrives to finish the deal.This worked just fine in coh1 when it was just wehr vs USF and coh2 and ost vs soviets.However, later on in the development I think wehr became not "not viable" but rather frustrating to play in both titles but maybe we focus on coh2 from now on.
Now initially in vanilla coh2 matches you could just spam grens and win if you wanted to do that, because grens at that time had equal armor as cons but they were much more accurate and had really strong rifle grenade and having mg was just a cherry on the top, very good but not necessary if you prefer to go the more mobile infantry route.PGrens were good for pretty much the same reason.
This is however not the case anymore with the 2 new allied factions who both have stronger early infantry that will most of the time beat grens in early game unless the conditions heavily favor the grens...eg, superior cover and long range or later the when grens have more vet and or/mg42's.Now of course there are players who favor the combined arms tactic but I feel like its more of a unnecessary burden since all other 4 factions are not completely reliant on their support weapons early.
So I personally would like to see either relic adding 5th man to both pgren and gren squads and tuning down gren damage per model and perhaps tuning the mg42 suppression down a notch to compensate, I feel like this change would a)make pgrens actually viable late game AI infantry for the high price they come...340mp Right now they are just too squishy to do this job
b)lessen chance of grenadiers instawiping from random explosives in late game and hence would give you more breathing room with them rather than using them as extremely cautious glass cannons from back lines.I guess another option would be replacing some of their later vet with additional squad member.
Something else I would like to see changed is the Pgren role.Right now its supposedly great anti-infantry medium range squad off the bat...but oh no, too squishy to do that.Instead you can use it as rather stronk at squad with dbl shrecks which kind of nullifies the purpose of the squad...stg44= medium range shreck = preferably max range.As such I would swap panzerfaust to pgrens and give grenadiers the option to upragade with 1 shreck and lmg or 2 shrecks invidually for 60 ammo each.That or one earlier proposition from some other forum user who suggested shrecks should be toggleable ability...although that was strongly opposed because it would remove the "choice factor" completely whether to upragade shrecks or not..still it would be better than current state of PGrens.
Oh and yes, i realize that ost is not completley underpowered crap faction atm nor I claim it to be, these in my opinion are pure QoL changes that would make sense seeing other 4 factions play similarly..apart from the soviets ofc but that is purely because cons and penols are both in a rather bad place atm. Thoughts?